If there exists one product on the supermarket shelves that is sold on packaging alone, it is bottled water. Identical in content and taste, the only real difference between competing brands is the marketing value of the label. You'd be hard pressed to differentiate between French, Belgian and British water in a blind taste test, but water brands are frequently sold on the basis of origin. Either that or the miraculous health-giving properties of some trace mineral or other.

It is a triumph of modern marketing that we in the UK, with universal access to cheap, clean water in the home, choose to consume an average of 37 litres of bottled water per person per year. The bottle itself has become a symbol of self-preservation, accompanying us to the office, to the gym and the bar. Unfortunately, a litre of bottled mineral water generates 600 times more carbon dioxide than a litre of tap water, and the polythene terephthalate bottles tend to sit around in landfills for a long time. Which is why Thames Water and Friends of the Earth are launching a campaign this week to rehabilitate tap water in restaurants and bars. After all, the stigma attached to ordering from the tap is an invention of the mineral water industry itself.

But the market for bottled water would be much smaller if local councils hadn't ripped out the water fountains from our streets. I remember, as a boy, drinking from any number of free fountains on my local high street. I used to find them in the hallways of public buildings, and in the cloakrooms of restaurants and bars. And when the time came to pass that water out the other end, there were plenty of public toilets to choose from. Today, I must buy a bottle of water for £1 and, later on, plead with the manager of a coffee shop or pub to let me use the toilet. I need to swallow my pride as I gulp from the cold water tap of public wash basins. And I need an encyclopedic knowledge of benevolently minded stores just to avoid getting caught short.

Drinking water and going to the toilet are two of life's most basic functions, but the civic infrastructure of the UK doesn't appear to stretch to that kind of thing. It's become the job of retail outlets and offices to perform these functions. Which is why we spend £2bn a year rehydrating ourselves with bottled water when we're away from the taps at home. How costly can it be for my local council to install the odd fountain alongside the CCTV cameras?

It all adds up to a grim sort of anxiety - a begrudging acceptance that we will be charged, usually over the odds, for almost everything in life. Perhaps it's overegging the pudding to suggest that disappearing amenities contribute to the breakdown of altruism, but the public takes its lead from the mean spirit of local government, which provides the most meagre of bare essentials.

Why, when the public is treated so cheaply, should it behave any better? Cities develop exclusively around the high street - coffee chains and shopping malls substitute for leisure centres and public amenities. Which is fine if you intend to spend your non-working life in shops. The latest development plans for Cardiff city centre, for instance, amount to an X Factor-style competition whereby 10 local "super shoppers" get to choose which chain stores they want to see on the new high street. If all goes to plan, the area will be transformed into one of the UK's shopping hotspots. Let's just hope one of the stores has the goodwill to build a toilet out the back.

The people who manage our cities might be surprised at how civilising free water could be. People behave better towards one another when they're treated less like consumers and more like citizens. One can only imagine the waves of pleasantry, were we treated to free cups of tea. And it might come in cheaper than Mosquito alarms.